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Could it have been love that caused a boyfriend and girlfriend duo, both members of the Clanton Street gang, to allegedly jack a 2000 Saturn the other night in North Hollywood and take the jewelry from the motorist and his female passenger? Or was it spur of the moment? Leo Vasquez, 30, and Angelia M. Langley, 28, are accused in the Nov. 24 heist at Saticoy Street and Coldwater Canyon Avenue in North Hollywood, police said. The two will now spend time apart, housed in separate county jail facilities, facing carjacking charges, with bail set at over $1 million, said Los Angeles Police Detective Sean Mahoney. Langley, unemployed from Torrance, and Vasquez, a driver from the Rampart area, were arrested by, get this, school police who were flagged down by a friend of the owner of the Saturn, who happened to spot the car rolling on Norris Avenue in Pacoima last night, Mahoney said. Apparently, Mahoney said, the duo were on their way to Langley’s sister’s house in Pacoima when they were arrested. Smart move, huh?

Something looked unusual as LAPD Sgt. Christopher Crosby swung 19 George 80 down Nordhoff Street onto Columbus Avenue. The streets once prowled by homeboys were now walked by women, strolling unaccompanied down the street with groceries and strollers.

“Man, look at that — ladies walking their dogs,” Crosby marveled. “You never used to see that.”

Long a problem area, even with the federal and city-funded Safer City Initiative officers on patrol, North Hills was quiet Tuesday night. Crime rates leaped earlier this year in spite of the dozens of extra officers, but as Crosby pointed the Crown Victoria left on Rayen Street, then right on Kester Avenue, things looked downright placid.

“We came by here,” he said, pointing at the Sepulveda Recreation Center, “late last night, around 2, and people were playing tennis. Tennis! But if we don’t keep it up, the gangs will come right back.”

Crosby, a surfer, martial artist and dog enthusiast, serves as the Mission Division’s gang sergeant. He’s friendly, laid-back and looks pretty much like you’d expect a cop to look.

As a kid, he was a trim baseball player, but at 18, he grew five inches to his present 6-foot-3 and hit the weight room. He topped out at 285 pounds and in his vest, gunbelt and blues, he cuts an imposing figure.

The streets were pretty empty and the radio was all but silent as Crosby eyed dark streets and peered into cars. Shrugging off the cold that blanketed the late November air, he stopped for a cup of coffee.

“I’m gonna order the manliest drink there is,” he said, voice dropping an octave.

A few minutes later, he had his peppermint Frappuccino, with extra mint and whipped cream, in hand and his slick-top was headed northeast toward Sylmar. He called out the demarcation between Astoria Garden Locos and San Fer territory along the way, pointing out the liquor stores and motels they use to meet and scheme.

There was a call of a 459 Hot Prowl on the outer edge of the 28-square-mile division and the gang units headed up to see what was afoot. Turned out to be nothing. As did a door knock on a Paca with a drug charge who wasn’t home. Up and down the streets, all around the territory, everything was sleepy.

By 10:15 p.m., the soccer games back on Columbus had died down, but the cars kept churning, looking for anything suspicious. A few gaunt, wild-eyed men scurried around, couples kissed goodnight and men tried to jump start their cars back into working order.

Eventually, a Valerio Street gangster turned up on Kester and Rayen. He was 19 and skinny, known as Silent. He wore a Saints jersey, Raiders jacket, baggy jeans and low-top Reeboks. A pair of young gang officers, just off their probation in 77th, had him hooked on the edge of the soccer field. Everyone was calm.

“So what’s going on, man?” Crosby asked.

“Nothin’,” Silent said. “Just tryin’ to visit my kid.”

His high school girlfriend and baby son lived across the street. He’d run from the cops before and they’d busted him for meth possession in the past.

“Are you on probation?” one officer asked him.

“Not that I know of,” Silent replied.

“You don’t recognize us?” the cop said. “That hurts.”

“Man, and we were the ones who arrested you, too,” his partner said.

“Your name’s all over the neighborhood,” Crosby chimed in. “Why do we see ‘Silent’ on the walls?”

“I don’t do that no more,” Silent said. “Since I got out. Since my son was born.”

“Oh, well is there another Silent?” Crosby asked. “A Big Silent? A Little Silent? How about Very Silent?”

While awaiting for a probation officer attached to the unit to arrive, Crosby shot the breeze with the gangster, advising him to go back to school and find a career. He slipped in questions about VST’s activities, asking who was beefing with who and who was friendly. Silent did not live up to his name.

“If you guys were to take me in for some reason, could you take me to say goodbye to my girl and my son?” he asked.

“Absolutely,” Crosby told him.

Silent shifted and yawned nervously in the cold, his eyes a little watery. The gangster’s cell phone rang and his girlfriend wondered why he was taking so long. But he came up clean, with no outstanding warrants or drugs in his pockets, so they searched him and Crosby wished him a good night.

A couple blocks later, the unit pulled over a couple more gangsters. They claimed they were on their way to church, but, given the fact that the clock was close to midnight, it seemed rather unlikely. One ended up in a squad car and by the time the cops and probation searched his home for a weapon, his father was very, very disappointed in the way his son’s evening finished out.

By the time the unit circled back to the station, things were even slower. No shootings, no foot pursuits, barely even any lawbreakers out on the streets. And that seemed just fine with all involved.

Normally, I don’t pay a whole lot of attention to the arguments in newspaper opinion pages. While I think we’ve got a good crew over at Friendly Fire (and I think Mr. O’Connor’s blog is really, really cool), in most publications, the opinion page is a snapshot of what’s wrong with political discourse today.

Generally, the columns and the letters to the editor on any subject, from taxes to the war to immigration, are just variations on “Conservatives are good and liberals are bad!” with “Liberals are good and
conservatives are bad!” as the counterpoint. Whatever the issue, it seems to inevitably devolve into a war of bumper sticker slogans where conservatives tell us that Bill Clinton was a pervert, while liberals will counter with the claim that George W. Bush either isn’t very smart or he’s a liar. Both sides point fingers, play loose with the facts and generally seem uninterested in actually fixing whatever the dispute is, preferring instead to belittle anyone who doesn’t agree with them. And that gets us absolutely nowhere.

This is all a long-winded way of setting myself up to get sucked into the same nasty game.

First, let me say that I’m not a talk radio listener, so I don’t know a whole lot about Mr. McIntyre or his show. Judging from his biography and some of the things he has posted on his Web site, it sounds like we agree on some issues and part ways on others. I will give him credit for having a nuanced variety of opinions you don’t normally hear from commentators, nor does he seem to be as shrill as some of his contemporaries.

So, with that in mind, I have to respectfully disagree with his argument. Mr. McIntyre throws out some stats about how Los Angeles has recorded 1,500 incidents in the past 18 months, with “an obscenely high number of serious assaults by gangbangers, including robberies, beatings and shootings.” It appears that he’s basing his outrage on this recent article by John L. Mitchell in the Times. He keys in on Mr. Mitchell’s descriptions (at least I’m guessing that’s where he got it, since he doesn’t attribute his facts) of the Mark Twain Library, which he describes as “a free-fire zone, caught in the sinkhole of a city capitulating to gang culture.” He likens the situation to Nazi book burning, the Taliban destroying the Buddhas of Bamyan and the destruction of Garfield High’s auditorium, allegedly caused by an arsonist.

That’s where his facts start to slide, as he blames it on multiple “arsonists,” rather than a single, 16-year-old freshman who was apparently upset with a teacher. He says there was “usual public hand-wringing… and little else.” I suppose the benefit concert headlined by Garfield alumni Los Lobos at the Gibson Amphitheatre a few weeks ago was just hand-wringing, but that’s not the main point of my argument.

It’s also worth noting, when you click the link on Mr. Mitchell’s article above, that most of the incidents mentioned involve things that are merely unpleasant, such as people with bad body odor, creepy, such as public masturbation, or crazy patrons. There are several gang crimes cited– and they’re certainly horrible– but the article also says that after a bad attack on a Twain patron in August, the library posted a couple security guards and the problem kids moved on.

After setting up this introduction, Mr. McIntyre hits this thesis: “The city of Los Angeles has surrendered to the gangs. There are still some small pockets of resistance, a few isolated yelps of protest, but we have largely accepted the degradation of colors, tagging, banging and bling.”

And, in addition to his library example, Mr. McIntyre hangs his argument on the Anthony Sena mural that Rick wrote, blogged about and video-ed the other day. He insults Mr. Sena, a murdered spray-painter and tattoo artist by referring to him as an “artist” (quote emphasis his) and suggests that the controversial mural represents the full-on invasion of gangsters.

Now I’ve met and spoken with Officer Moreno several times and I know that he’s a sharp, respected cop and that he did his homework on the mural before speaking to Rick. He interviewed Jeff Measles, the primary artist behind the display, and received assurances that if the mural gets tagged over, there will be no reprisals.

Here’s a fuller context Moreno’s comments from Rick’s article that Mr. McIntyre omits:
Meanwhile, some support for the mural comes from an unlikely source: graffiti experts, including LAPD Officer Ed Moreno, who works with the West Valley Division’s gang impact graffiti detail section.

“I’ve done some research on this guy, Anthony Sena, and from what I’ve seen in the neighborhood … this is a piece of art,” Moreno said.

“I’d rather see a piece of beautiful art like that than a bunch of tagging where these kids come and cross each other out.”

Moreno said Sena’s life also sends a message to other taggers that they can change.

“This guy pretty much transferred from being a tagger to a tattoo artist who was pretty well-respected,” he said. “If you look at the mural, it’s a peace mural and dedicated to somebody that was killed.”

Mr. Sena, known by the moniker ‘Ohjae,’ doesn’t sound like a perfect citizen, but, if you read Rick’s well-balanced piece, you’ll see that he’d moved on to achieve success as a legitimate artist. As much as critics want to deny that art can come from a spray can, I’ve seen it used to sell cars at the LA Auto Show and videogames at E3. In the same way that tattoos migrated from biker gangs’ arms onto the backs of squeaky-clean college girls, graffiti art has moved from its strictly sketchy past into the mainstream.

That aside, Mr. McIntyre’s argument that gangs have taken over all of Los Angeles is simply not true. Looking at the LAPD’s most recent stats, there were 5,758 gang-related crimes in Los Angeles through September. While that sounds frightening (Egads! Around 21 each day!), it’s also 200 fewer than the city recorded the year before, a 3.4 percent reduction in gang crime. In the West Valley area where Officer Moreno goes after actual taggers and gangsters with cans of Krylon, gang-related crimes dropped 3.1 percent since last year.

Don’t get me wrong, any gang crime is unacceptable. And it’s an especially emotional sort of law-breaking because gangsters tend to be big, scary-looking guys who operate under seemingly alien codes of conduct. Whenever their bullets miss one another and end up in an innocent neighbor or child playing nearby, the wounds sting even harder because it’s unpleasant to think that these guys with tattoos on their faces live in our communities.

But if we’re going to work together to fight back against gangs’ influence, we need reasoned debate, not rhetoric such as this:
When schools and libraries become free-fire zones and young lives are snuffed out in front of tattoo parlors with cutesy-pie names making light of smack (Needle Pushers, get it?) and it’s considered an honor to have your life memorialized in spray paint on a liquor-store wall, the canary in L.A.’s coal mine is on life support.

If the people of Los Angeles don’t act, we’ll take our place alongside those who accommodated the book burners in Germany and the Taliban Buddha bombers. We have a choice – library cards or toe tags. What’s it gonna be?

Cops from Chief Bratton on down will tell you that the key to combating crime is an informed, involved community. If we’re going to have that, to really rise up against the gang lifestyle, the community needs to arm itself with facts instead of hysteria. Scaring people out of the library because it’s an alleged hotbed of gangsterism, a supposition not borne out by fact, playing up arguments over a painting instead of focusing on real crime and attacking a cop whose expert opinion doesn’t square with a narrow thesis will not help bring us any closer to a real solution.

As always, we welcome your thoughts and comments on this clearly sensitive subject. Perhaps I’m totally off-base on this, but I’m curious to know what y’all think.

The Times today has an interesting story out of Compton. A Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department gang task force in place there has helped push down the gang crime rate over the last two years. Deputies report 29 slayings so far this year, the lowest in 20 years. Gang violence has been falling in Compton for nearly two years, since Sheriff Lee Baca assigned a special team to tackle the problem. There were 65 homicides there in 2005. The sheriffs task force has been confronting suspected gang members and searching them and their homes for guns. latimes.com

It was a quiet, slow day and the conversation meandered from the old days of policing “when you just had your stick and your mouth to protect you” to Lee Harvey Oswald to gangster etiquette. That led us to how gangs recruit.

“If they don’t get affection, kids go and look for it with the gang instead of Little League or piano lessons,” he said.

But not all of them– plenty of kids who grow up in jacked-up households reject that and go onto become upstanding, law-abiding citizens. Even the gangsters often dream of holding down respectable jobs, sometimes more unusual ones than you’d think.

“Almost every single guy you arrest says they wanted to be a cop,” he continued. “‘Oh, yeah, I was gonna do that, then I got the whole felony drug thing.’ They wanted to do it for the same reason they join the gang– the camaraderie, the family, the sense of belonging.”

So what’s the solution? How do we get kids to become the next generation of police officers instead of their “clients?” What makes some get into trouble while others stay straight? And for that matter, what makes cops sometimes go bad? Or gangsters sometimes go straight?

I wish, dear readers, that I had those answers for you. But I fear that it’s quite late and I’m not quite as keen an observer of human nature as the lieutenant. So we’ll save that for another time, when I’m sure I’ll be able to decipher all the mysteries of the human soul. In the meantime, just make your kids read Harry Potter. Little League and piano lessons might not be a bad idea, either.

The Times takes a look at rent and taxes today, and not the kind paid for your apartment and on your 1040EZ form. Like many forms of gang crime, though it initially only affects a small slice of the population, it can spill over violently to hurt innocent folks unconnected to the business. Most recently, this had tragic consequences for a .

Killings like that get people all riled up, but the underlying crime is a major quality of life issue, as well.

Our competitor Ms. Leovy at the Homicide Report posted something that caught my eye on the always touchy subject of Black-Latino tension today. I’ll paste a bit, then jump back in….
“LAPD is not on the brink,” of a major inter-racial crime wave, three University of California Irvine scholars have concluded after examining assault, robbery and homicide data in the city’s southern police precincts.

The researchers said that, although some cross-racial crimes involving blacks and Latinos have been “sensationalized,” the numbers suggest that offenders preying on people of their own race is a much bigger problem, and should remain the focus of police attention.

“It sort of goes against the more spectacular stories that have been dramatized in the media,” another researcher, UC Irvine assistant professor John R. Hipp, said of the study’s findings. “It’s far more common to see [violence] going on within groups. We don’t see any real trend here.”

The study by Hipp and fellow UC Irvine criminologists George E. Tita and Lindsay N. Boggess compared aggravated assault, robbery and homicide cases between 2000 and 2006 in the four precincts of LAPD’s South Bureau against 2000 Census data. It found that black offenders were nearly eight times more likely to kill another black person as to kill a Latino, and Latino offenders were nearly twice as likely to kill another Latino as a black person.

I haven’t read the study myself, so I can’t offer much analysis, but it definitely goes against the oft-repeated idea that Blacks and Latinos are more likely to target one another for crime. That’s not to say it’s not a serious problem — whenver race gets injected into an already emotional crime, it resonates much more deeply with everyone. And certainly, if you’re the Black guy who gets shot by Canoga Park Alabama or a Latino randomly targeted by some Rollin’ 60s looking for revenge, it’s a serious problem.

As reporters, what are we to do with this? I don’t know, it’s a hard call. When it’s a straightforward robbery or murder, where the crime went down because of greed or other typical criminal motivations, perhaps we over-report the racial angle. But if you’ve got La Eme ordering hits on Blacks to claim turf or vice versa, I think the media has a responsibility to report it as a hate crime. Any time that regular folks can get drawn into criminal beefs through no fault of their own, then it bears mentioning.

Ultimately, the final commenter (at least when I last checked) on Ms. Leovy’s post has it right: “At the end of the day we all bleed the same color. Red.” It kind of sounds like a t-shirt slogan, but it’s right on. It’ll be a long time, I’m afraid, until we put our racial issues aside. But until we do, we’re going to keep seeing people lying face up in the church whose only crime was being born a different color than the man on the other side of the gun.

VAN NUYS – Police arrested two gang members Friday on suspicion of shooting a man Monday outside a restaurant near Birmingham High School, authorities said.

The men, and in some cases the gun used Monday, might be tied to several other shootings, including a July gang altercation at an adjacent restaurant that left a man shot in the head, said Capt. Jim Miller, commanding officer for the LAPD Van Nuys Division.

Monday’s afternoon shooting, outside a Jack in the Box restaurant at Vanowen Street and Balboa Boulevard, sent teens running and left parents and school administrators concerned about student safety amid escalating off-campus gang violence.

Sanderson Montes, 18, one of the men arrested Friday in a series of early morning search-warrant raids carried out in North Hollywood and Van Nuys, is a former Birmingham High School student, police said.

Montes, a North Hollywood resident, and the other man arrested, Walter Oswaldo Guerra, 18, of Van Nuys are both members of the Mara Salvatrucha gang, police said.

For the full story and a map, click here to read the rest at Dailynews.com.

Our competitors over at the San Fernando Valley Sun have a well-put-together story on gang life. In it, they chat with Ernie Simental, a Blythe Street member who claims the gang but says he’s no killer, Roberto Perez, who says he’s inactive with Langdon Street, and Donald “Big D” Garcia, an ex-gangster who now works for Communities in Schools.

It’s told in their own words and provides a good look into the pressures to join a gang and to get into trouble. It looks like Ernie, who seems like a smart guy, is beginning to think of a better future than jacking bikes and brawling:Theres always fighting, and over a street that doesnt even belong to us. Thats how stupid it is, but its the reality. Its crazy, the reality of it, when you think about it, when you try to look at it from the inside, its so confusing you dont know where to start.

He’s pretty evocative of why the gang problem’s so frustrating: you’re dealing with emotional, irrational kids whose bad decisions are magnified because they involve violence and crime. Even for guys like him (and I think I may have met him while doing a story on the job program he got booted from last year after a parole violation), who want to do something with their lives, who realize that killing each other over street signs is futile, they keep messing up. Here’s hoping he’ll be one of the ones who gets straight and does something with his life. Otherwise, he’ll join the ranks of forgotten statistics.

To follow up on Rick’s post from last night, I’m glad to say we sent someone to check out the goings-on. Mr. Dobuzinskis, normally seen East of the Five, did a fine job covering the event with this story.